Quotes About Organisms

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.

Margulis said, because rival organisms and lack of resources prevent the vast majority of P. vulgaris from reproducing. This is natural selection, Darwin's great insight. All living creatures have the same purpose: to make more of themselves, ensuring their biological future by the only means available. And all living creatures have a maximum reproductive rate: the greatest number of offspring they can generate in a lifetime.

Grâce à cette lutte, les variations, quelque faibles qu'elles soient, et de quelque causes qu'elles proviennent, tendent à préserver les individus d'une espèce et se transmettent ordinairement à leur descendance, pourvu qu'elles soient utiles à ces individus dans leurs rapports infiniment complexes avec les autres êtres organisés et avec la nature extérieure.

since all organisms vary, and all reproduce themselves in greater numbers than can survive, there must always be competition between variants; in other words, the principle of natural selection, too, is universally applicable.

The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.

Life is the name of all things that have shells separating them from the outside, the ability to sustain and reproduce themselves, and the capacity to evolve.

But structures are processes are not there so that organisms can survive and reproduce. It is the other way round: organisms survive and reproduce because these structures have happened to gradually develop. They reproduce to populate the Earth because they are functional.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

If our society continues to support basic research on how living organisms function, it is likely that my great grandchildren will be spared the agony of losing family members to most types of cancer.

There are over 7,000 different types of proteins in typical eukaryotic cells; the total number depends on the cell class and function.

'Fecundity' is an ugly word for an ugly subject. It is ugly, at least, in the eggy animal world. I don't think it is for plants.

But water alone does not generate oxygen, absorb carbon dioxide, or yield the simple sugars that are the basis of food production powering most of life on Earth. By itself, water does not produce the dimethyl sulfide molecules around which water gathers to form vapor that becomes clouds that in turn become rain, sleet, and snow. Microscopic photosynthetic organisms in the sea do all of these things and much more.

Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.

The biggest single-celled organisms in the world. They live beneath the Antarctic ice. And as they grow, they take grains of sand from their environment and glue them together to form hard outer skins.

Testaceous turbinated exanguious animals—

Yes, not only humans but also every other organism in the cosmos, as well as the planets or moons on which they thrive, would not exist but for the wreckage of spent stars. So you're made of detritus. Get over it. Or better yet, celebrate it. After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?

These early, single-celled organisms unwittingly transformed Earth's carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into one with sufficient oxygen to allow aerobic organisms to emerge and dominate the oceans and land.

It once seemed that the most profound feats stemming from DNA-based science would spring from our ability to read and detect genes, which we call the science of genomics. But the real opportunities lie in our ability to write DNA, to synthesize new gene sequences and insert them into organisms, resulting in brand-new biological functions.

All complex life shares an astonishing catalogue of elaborate traits, from sex to cell suicide to senescence, none of which is seen in a comparable form in bacteria.

multicellular life. All animals, all plants, all of them depend on

We have already seen that certain organisms, such as man, tend for a time to maintain and often even to increase the level of their organization, as a local enclave in the general stream of increasing entropy, of increasing chaos and de-differentiation. Life is an island here and now in a dying world.

Even what's inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you'd die. Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited.

Connection types have gone into freeze in order to survive. They are sensitive organisms whose capacity for intimacy and independence are greatly limited.

The thing is, the "scientists" back at the School had been playing with risky stuff, combining human and nonhuman DNA. Basically, the spliced genes started to unravel after a while, and the organisms tended to, well, self-destruct. The flock and I had seen it happen a million times: The rabbit-dog combo had been such bad news. Same with the sheep-macaque monkey splice. The mouse-cat experiment had produced a huge, hostile mouse with great balance and an inability to digest either